Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs Less than half of seriously ill patients attending NSW emergency departments are receiving treatment on time as the state’s health minister blamed unprecedented demand for hospitals and ambulances on declining access to bulk-billed GP visits.More patients visited NSW hospitals with immediately life-threatening conditions such as stroke, heavy bleeding and severe chest pain than any three-month period since 2010, hospital data for July to September showed.At Prince of Wales in Randwick, less than a quarter of patients with life-threatening conditions started their treatment within 10 minutes.Credit: Aresna VillanuevaThese “triage two” patients require treatment within 10 minutes, but fewer than half met that benchmark, another record low that has alarmed doctors and nurses struggling to keep up with increasing numbers of patients with complex and serious conditions.“Patients are getting sicker,” said Jess Kybert, a NSW Nurses and Midwives’ Association delegate working in the emergency department at Blacktown hospital.“They [patients] … are having to wait longer because we don’t have the resources, the staff and the spaces to get to them within the appropriate time-frames.”Only 22 per cent of triage two patients at Blacktown hospital start treatment within 10 minutes – twice as many as the same time last year – but second to Campbelltown hospital (11.8 per cent) as the worst-performing major hospital emergency department in the state.Prince of Wales in Randwick had the poorest record of the state’s 14 principal referral hospitals, with fewer than a quarter of emergency patients receiving treatment within 10 minutes.Despite a downward trend in the number of patients with semi-urgent and non-urgent conditions, a quarter of patients leaving NSW emergency departments in the past year believed their condition could have been treated by a GP or another health professional outside a hospital.
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